HMS Inglefield (D02): The Last Flotilla Leader, a King at Scapa and a Glider Bomb off Anzio

The Last of the Leaders

HMS Inglefield was ordered from Cammell Laird at Birkenhead under the 1935 programme as the flotilla leader of the I Class destroyers. For twenty years each new destroyer flotilla had been given a leader, a slightly larger ship built to the same general design, with extra cabins and office space for the captain commanding the flotilla, called Captain (D), and his staff.

Inglefield was the last of them. After her the Navy simply fitted one ship of each class with the extra accommodation instead of building a separate leader.

She was laid down on 29 April 1936, launched on 15 October and completed on 25 June 1937, the first ship to carry the name. She was named after Admiral Sir Edward Inglefield, the Victorian sailor and Arctic explorer who had searched for the lost Franklin expedition, and her badge was the double headed eagle from his family crest, with the motto "The sun my compass".

Like her sisters she carried four 4.7 inch guns and ten torpedo tubes.

Later in 1937 she went out to Malta to lead the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla in the Mediterranean, and the photograph above shows her steaming through Grand Harbour in those last years of peace, with the battlecruiser Hood, then flagship of the battlecruiser squadron in the Mediterranean, moored behind her.

Courageous and U-45

At the outbreak of war she was leading the flotilla from Malta, and was soon sent home with it to the Western Approaches, under Captain Arthur Talbot. On 16 September 1939 she sailed from Plymouth in the screen of the carrier Courageous on an anti-submarine patrol.

The next afternoon a distress call came from the British steamer Kafiristan, under attack by U-53 about 350 miles west of Cape Clear, and Inglefield and Intrepid were sent off to help. That evening, with her screen reduced to two destroyers, Courageous was torpedoed by U-29 and sank with more than five hundred of her crew.

Inglefield came back to join the hunt for the U-boat, without success.

Four weeks later the flotilla had its revenge of a sort. On 14 October, south west of Ireland, Inglefield, Ivanhoe, Intrepid and Icarus hunted down U-45 and sank her with depth charges. There were no survivors.

At the end of November, now with the Home Fleet under Captain Percy Todd, she and the Tribal Maori were sent out to the damaged submarine Triad, which could not dive, and Inglefield towed her at four knots into neutral Norwegian waters, where the Norwegians allowed her to make repairs.

U-63 and Norway

On 25 February 1940, escorting convoy HN 14 home from Norway, she was one of the destroyers that hunted down U-63 south east of Shetland with Escort and her sister Imogen, forcing her to the surface; 24 of the German crew were picked up.

In April she was leading the destroyers escorting the minelayer Teviot Bank to mine the Norwegian coast in Operation Wilfred when the German invasion fleet was reported at sea, and the operation was called off. Through the Norwegian campaign she screened the cruisers off the coast, and on 2 May she helped bring the troops out of Andalsnes with the cruisers Manchester and Birmingham.

In June she escorted Electra and Antelope home after the two destroyers collided while screening Ark Royal off Trondheim.

Dakar

In September 1940 she went south with the force sent to put General de Gaulle's Free French ashore at Dakar, in French West Africa, in the screen of the battleships Barham and Resolution. The Vichy French garrison would not come over, and on 23 September the British ships found themselves fighting the French forts, the battleship Richelieu and the French warships in the harbour.

Inglefield engaged the submarine Persee and came under fire from the shore batteries, and was hit by a shell that caused structural damage and casualties among her crew. The operation was abandoned two days later, and she spent the next weeks on the convoys out of Freetown before bringing convoy HG 46 home from Gibraltar and going into a London shipyard for refit.

Bismarck, the King and Spitsbergen

In 1941 she was back with the Home Fleet, supporting the commando raid on the Lofoten Islands in March and hunting a U-boat with Maori around convoy HX 121 in April. On 22 May she sailed from Scapa Flow in the screen of King George V and Repulse as the fleet went out after the Bismarck.

Like most of the destroyers, she ran short of fuel and was detached on the 24th, but she earned the battle honour for the action.

On 8 August King George VI came to Scapa Flow to visit the Home Fleet, and the next day Inglefield embarked him and carried him round the anchorage to review the ships, then took him back across the Pentland Firth to the mainland. Within a fortnight she was in the Arctic.

On 20 August she escorted the oiler Black Ranger to Spitsbergen to fuel the ships covering the first convoy to Russia, and in Sassen Bay she struck an uncharted rock and damaged the dome of her Asdic. She stayed with the covering force of Victorious, Devonshire and Suffolk for the Dervish convoy, the very first of the Arctic convoys, and then for Argus carrying Hurricanes for the Russian front to Murmansk.

That October Argyllshire adopted her after its Warship Week, and a refit on the Humber gave her a surface warning radar set and a high frequency direction finder for fixing the radio signals of U-boats.

The Arctic Convoys

For the next eighteen months the Arctic was her main theatre. In April 1942 she was briefly detached to help escort the American carrier Wasp on her first run carrying Spitfires to Malta, the voyage that earned her the Malta Convoys honour, and then she rejoined the battle fleet, with American battleships and cruisers alongside, covering the convoys PQ 15 and QP 11.

In May she went right through to the Kola Inlet and led the escort of the homeward convoy QP 12. In June she went out again, carrying stores and ammunition for the escorts at Kola, and led the escort of QP 13 home with Achates and Volunteer, carrying survivors of the cruiser Edinburgh, sunk in May with her cargo of Russian gold.

On 3 July, as the disaster of PQ 17 was unfolding, she was detached on Admiralty orders to search for the battleship Tirpitz, which had left her anchorage.

After a refit she was back for the winter convoys. In December 1942 she was part of the fighting escort for JW 51A with Faulknor, Eclipse and Fury, which reached Kola on Christmas Day without being found by the enemy, and brought the return convoy RA 51 home.

In February and March 1943 she escorted JW 53 out and RA 53 home in some of the worst weather of the war. Then, in the critical spring of 1943, she was lent to the Atlantic, first with the escort carrier Biter in the 3rd Escort Group and then as leader of the 4th Escort Group with Eclipse, Fury and Icarus, driving off the U-boats around convoy HX 231.

In May she took Howe out to Gibraltar and brought Nelson home.

Sicily, Salerno and the Prime Minister

In July 1943 she went to the Mediterranean for the invasion of Sicily, screening the battleships of Force H in the Ionian Sea and bombarding Catania with Offa. On 23 July she attacked the Italian submarine Ascianghi without success; she was sunk later by Laforey and Eclipse.

In September she screened Force H off Salerno, and in November she escorted Renown, with Winston Churchill aboard, from Algiers by way of Malta to Alexandria for the Cairo conference with Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek.

Anzio

In January 1944 she joined the Northern Attack Force for the landings at Anzio. On 22 January, the day of the landings, she, the cruiser Dido and Kempenfelt carried out a diversionary bombardment of Civitavecchia to the north, and over the next week she shelled the coast road at Formia and supported the troops ashore with Mauritius.

In February, with the beachhead under heavy German counter attack, she carried General Alexander, the Allied commander in Italy, out to Anzio to see the situation for himself, and she spent the rest of the month off the beaches with Urchin and the other destroyers, giving fire support and guarding the anchorage.

The Germans had a new weapon in the Mediterranean, the Henschel Hs 293, a rocket propelled glider bomb steered on to its target by radio from the bomber that launched it. At dusk on 25 February 1944 one of them hit Inglefield off Anzio and she sank.

Thirty five of her men were lost, and 157 survivors were picked up and taken to Naples. She had been the leader of her flotilla for almost seven years, and she ended the war with ten battle honours: Atlantic 1939 to 1943, North Sea 1940, Norway 1940 to 1942, Bismarck 1941, Malta Convoys 1942, Arctic 1942 to 1943, Sicily 1943, Salerno 1943, Mediterranean 1944 and Anzio 1944. Her flotilla mates are among the prints in the I Class destroyers collection.